Richard Preston is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He has been the paper's features editor, news editor and comment editor.

WW1: 76 days to go – cash for honours is debated in the Commons, Kipling writes a poem for Ulster

Picture of the day in Telegraph 100 years ago showed Queen Alexandra being wheeled into the Chelsea Flower Show in her bath-chair. In Parliament, a prescient debate on 'traffic in titles' examined the acquisition of honours by 'rich nobodies' who made hefty donations to political parties. Before the decade was out, Maundy Gregory would be broking these deals for Lloyd George:

From New York came a report of Theodore Roosevelt's return from his South American adventures, during which he had been writing exclusively for The Daily Telegraph:

At the annual dinner of the Foreign Press Association (and in the presence of the German ambassador) Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, made these optimistic remarks about maintaining peace in Europe:

A few days earlier, Rudyard Kipling had addressed an anti-Home Rule demonstration in Tunbridge Wells. Now the paper printed a poem by him, a call to arms to Ulster's Protestants: